shani dagan - Cotton

Installation View, 2017

Cotton is an almost primal memory for anyone who grew up surrounded by fields. At its core, it is a journey toward preserving a disappearing memory. The whiteness surrounding Dagan’s birthplace was like cotton wool protecting a precious object, cushioning it from harm. This white memory, both fragile and persistent, became a journey of preservation - which is also a journey of letting go.

Dagan photographs monochromatic, poetic images that arise from a visual and emotional autobiographical memory oscillating between movement and stillness. Her work distills the sense of childhood purity, yet it is constantly shadowed by the morbidity and sanctity of death. Between these extremes lies her space of creation: the attempt to hold, wrap, and freeze a memory at the very moment it slips away.

The project spans multiple photographic series moving from a simple white garment to burial shrouds. Between these poles, Dagan explores processes of freezing and thawing the garment-body within a bleached, illuminated space. The absence of a physical human figure becomes an intensified presence: a reminder of what is missing.

The dominance of white creates a pastoral calm that coexists with unease, alienation, and a sense of disappearance. White becomes an alternative space, fragile yet monumental - a last grasp at a moment that will not return, a swan song to cotton, to time, and to a dissolving reality.